I like how you mention that being a teacher is a creative career rather than a business-orient career. I know when I was going through grade school I found that teachers that were excited by what they did and had a creative way of conveying information has a positive impact on me. Those teachers that were boring/went line-by-line through the information they had to teach were the ones that I got the least out of.

I understand the need for making sure a curriculum is uniform across at least a state. But when making sure the curriculum is uniform stifles the creativity then something has to change.

I’m a little fuzzy on CCCS, but from what little I have read about it and what the acronym means I feel that they are just a set of standards/requirements that a teach needs to make sure to meet when teaching. Aside from that, the teacher has the ability to decide how to teach the information. If that is the case then why can teachers not have a creative way of teaching the information they need to make sure to cover?

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I wholeheartedly agree with this post. Being mindful doesn’t entail the appropriation of new skills or knowledge, but rather simply remembering how we naturally learn. Actually, it’s almost the opposite process – clearing away the mental baggage so that mindfulness can happen naturally.

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Thank you all for these wonderful replies! It is helping me to see learning in yet another way, as my post seems to be doing for many of you also. I am also one of those people that won’t remember to look up a word later, so doing it in the moment is just so much more effective. I hadn’t even thought about how Google could help those who don’t have English as a first language. English is my first language, and I still have to look up words in the classroom. Maybe this is cause to rethink the policy that some have for no technology in class.

This exchange of ideas is also giving me much more confidence in the learning that can come from blogging!

“Galen, oh Galen, that’s just some people talkin’…”

Might it not be a good thing to draw our attention, that is, to make us mindful of infant learning, perhaps the most rapacious kind of learning? And had not LRRR learned more rapaciously, would she not then have been more suspicious of the wolve’s rapey tactics? Hmmm…

Excellent short read! I found myself laughing out loud at Starbucks when reading your article. Thank you!

I think you point out to a fundamental dilemma in this passage:

How am I to embrace the diversity of my student body while accepting the conformity of the curriculum? How do I allow my students to express themselves and engage with me and each other, while still transmitting the entirety of each lesson? How do I allow them the time to ponder ideas and gain an individual ownership of them while staying on schedule?

This is something that every professor grapples with, between allowing room for creativity and discussion in your class and the imperative of the Syllabus and delivering course content. There are time and space constraints that are always there, which leads professors like you and me to try our best to avoid monotony in the classroom. I would be interested in discussing how you organize the online class discussion since it’s something I would like to try as well!

Depends on which bridge you used ?

This was a great post! I have some of the same struggles with trying to translate some of the activities or concepts I’ve observed in classes outside of my discipline to my engineering classes. So much emphasis is made on the “right” answer that I think we’ve created an issue of students having procedural knowledge rather than concept knowledge on things that we need them to know as engineers. (I know I was guilty of this in my engineering science classes as an undergrad…) This semester though, through this class and others, I’m coming up with easy ways to implement active learning activities into my classroom so that the students are just mindlessly retaining information that they’ll lose when the semester is over. I do think it’s important to have a wrap-up moment at the end of class – another thing I don’t see in my engineering classes – where you make sure the students have the key points that they were suppose to get from the class period.

I think that there is a big difference between being on the internet and surfing Facebook and being on the internet and using Google to look up terms you might not know or extra information about a certain topic. To me using Google to do searching is just another form of learning and may help students. If you’re able to use the internet for ‘good’ during a class rather than for ‘bad’ I think that it can be extremely useful just as you found out. As the quote you provided said learning is: “the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience,…”. To me using the internet to look up extra details is form of experience and one that sounds like works well for you.

Tim nails it on the head here! The problems in education are deep and systemic; new and improved teaching methods that cultivate and put a premium on mindfulness are important but they do not and cannot address the underlying causes of the problem.

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